In the late ’60s, when Steve McQueen (the actor, not the current director) was one of the biggest stars in the world, McQueen outlined a treatment for an action/adventure movie. “Outlined” may be too simple a word; in fact, there’s a 1700-page document from McQueen setting up the film. Now that outline is being turned into a script by Terry Rossio (Pirates of the Caribbean) called Yucatan, which is now a potential starring vehicle for Robert Downey, Jr.Read More »

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One of the great never-made films in action movie history is Yucatan, an epic treasure hunt/heist film concocted by actor Steve McQueen. The star of Bullitt and The Great Escape never got to make the film, but 1700 pages of notes on the film were found among Mr. McQueen’s possessions years after his death.

The film has been a possible project at Warner Bros. ever since that discovery, and now Sherlock Holmes screenwriter Anthony Peckham has been hired to mold it into a star vehicle for Robert Downey, Jr.Read More »

McG hopes to resurrect a lost Steve McQueen project as part of a new three-year first-look deal at Warner Bros. When Steve McQueen died 26 years ago, he left behind two custom-made trunks containing 16 leather-bound notebooks full of drawings, period photographs, a detailed script continuity containing over 1,700 pages of hand-typed/written material by McQueen. This was the remains of his lost vanity project titled Yucatan, a blueprint for a movie written entirely without dialogue, in a “hyper-stylized poetry.”

According to the New York Times, the story followed “an archaeologist from the Museum of London who enlists a renegade Navy diver, who works for the oil companies and races motorcycles on the shores of the Mojave, in a plan to explore the cenotes, caves in the Yucatan jungle that reveal underground lakes. Here, a millennium before, Mayan priests sacrificed virgins covered in gold and precious jewels, a fortune rumored to still adorn their skeletons at the bottom of these sacred wells.”

Yucatan is just one of three projects that Charlie’s Angeles director McG is currently developing. And in my opinion, it’s by far the most interesting. McG is one of only a couple directors I would like to see tackle the epic motorcycle chases in Yucatan.Â But the question is, who can replace Steve McQueen?